Understanding T-Shirt Quality 5 Questions to ask before you buy a Tshirt

What’s the Composition- What’s your tshirt exactly made of, is it 100% Cotton, 100% Polyester or a blend of cotton Polyester. Most of the Good blank tshirt manufacturers will tell you the exact blend, it’s very easy to get the blend checked at testing labs like SGS Labs etc. the exact blend is important to make you judge whether the tshirt you are buying is suitable for the purpose you are buying it for.

What’s the GSM – GSM is the measure of weight of the fabric or thickness of the fabric (only to some extent). It’s measured as Grams per Square meter, more the GSM Heavier the tshirt. Ideally a cotton Crew neck tshirt should be 160-180 GSM for ideal summer wear, whereas a hoodie for light winters can be around 280-300 GSM. It’s very important from pricing also, the manufacturer may Quote you for 200 GSM and supply a 160 GSM Fabric. You can request for a GSM Cutting for your reference.

Yarn – Type of yarn used is of utmost importance, understanding Yarn and its properties is quite complicated however the basics one need to ask is what’s the count of yarn used and whether the Cotton yarn used is combed or semi-Combed. A combed yarn is of superior quality.

Treatment done on fabric – to make the fabric handfeel better or to give certain functionalities to a fabric, various special treatments are done like Bio-wash, Silicone polish, wicking etc. Bio wash and Silicone polish makes the fabric handfeel better, and wicking makes moisture management easy.

Color fastness – How good is the color of the fabric, on a rating of 5, a color fastness of 3-4 is good, 4-5 is extremely good. This is again a very easy test available at most of the garment labs.